In `Match Point' Woody Allen serves up an ace

The first image in Woody Allen's new movie "Match Point" -- one that haunts the entire film -- is of a tennis ball being struck back and forth across a net.

The shot focuses on the net as the ball passes repeatedly over it. We don't see either of the players volleying. But we do hear the boyish, slightly anxious voice of the film's main character, tennis player/social climber Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) musing on fate: "The man who said, 'I'd rather be lucky than good, saw deeply into life ... ' " he says, a leitmotif that will be repeated obsessively throughout the film.

Then, as the ball strikes the top of the net, ricochets up and freezes in the frame, Chris concludes: "There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net. And, for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward and you win ... or maybe it doesn't and you lose."

Woody Allen is now 70 and "Match Point" -- one of the big hits at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival and already a critical success after its opening last Friday in Chicago -- is one of the luckier breaks of his career. It's a movie that restores some of his tarnished cultural image and brings one of our best, most prolific, but recently more underrated moviemakers back into the game.

At first glance, this seeming non-comedy and romantic suspense thriller set in upper-class London seems a big change for Allen. And "Match Point" succeeds precisely where almost every Woody Allen movie since 1994's "Bullets Over Broadway" has failed. It seduces the audience.

It may not be classic Allen comedy, funny in the usual way. But it's definitely fun, an intricate tragicomedy of manners and morals, with a complex crime scheme plot, reminiscent at times of Hitchcock, or Patricia Highsmith ("Strangers on a Train" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley"). Also, it's a film made with such immaculate skill, sparkling intelligence and excellent acting -- by Rhys Meyers and an almost all-British cast -- that, from those first enthusiastic showings at Cannes, it has brought Allen right out of the critical wilderness in which he has been wandering throughout the 2000s.

Change of fortunes

Allen could use some luck. Something of a media target since 1992 and the scandal of his affair with Soon-Yi Previn (Mia Farrow's adopted then-college-age daughter, whom he later married), he has seen his cultural stock sink with his sullied public image. His movies' acceptance fell from the high point of his official classics "Annie Hall" (1977), "Manhattan" (1979), "Hannah and Her Sisters" (1986) and "Crimes and Misdemeanors" (1989), to the almost contemptuous dismissal by some of his most recent films, "Anything Else" (2003) and "Melinda and Melinda" (2004).

Always something of a minority taste -- an art filmmaker in a country ruled by Hollywood -- Allen gradually became even more so after 1992. Especially since his star actor image and directorial persona were so intertwined. No matter how hard Allen tried to modify and criticize his own film persona in movies like "Deconstructing Harry" (where he played an arrogant, self-obsessed writer), "Small Time Crooks" (a boorish criminal), "Hollywood Ending" (a blind director whose inept filmmaking was adored by the French) or "Anything Else" (a Manhattan nut case), and no matter how effectively he cast other actors in Woodyesque roles (John Cusack in "Bullets Over Broadway," Kenneth Branagh in "Celebrity"), the movies would still get blasted.

If "Match Point" has become a breakthrough, it's in part because it successfully neutralizes the cultural baggage his presence became for some viewers. In this movie, there's no Woody to kick around anymore -- at least for now. The cast is British -- with one American, his apparent new movie-muse Scarlett Johansson -- and mostly young. And the film is built around a character who seems nothing like Woody: the very handsome, seductive, Irish-born tennis teacher Chris.

Yet "Match Point' is more redolent of the old Woody -- the guy who always seemed to be kvetching on screen about his problems -- than it first appears. He has simply chosen a different arena and different mouthpieces: the bright young things and arrivistes of contemporary London and England, in a world of posh cafes, country estates, the Royal Opera House and the Tate Modern.

In fact, Meyers' Chris shares traits with his creator's old movie image. Like "Woody," he dreams above his station, reads high-intellect stuff like Dostoyevsky, goes to art movies ("The Motorcycle Diaries") and gets tangled up in lust and angst.